‘I will repay your trust,’ UK PM Johnson tells ex-Labour voters on trip to north

FAN Editor
FILE PHOTO: Britain's general election 2019
FILE PHOTO: Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson is pictured after delivering a statement at Downing Street after winning the general election, in London, Britain, December 13, 2019. REUTERS/Lisi Niesner/File Photo

December 14, 2019

LONDON (Reuters) – Prime Minister Boris Johnson visited former strongholds of his Labour opponents in northern England on Saturday and pledged to repay their trust for helping to deliver a stunning victory for his Conservative Party in Britain’s national election.

Johnson led the Conservatives on Thursday to their biggest election win since Margaret Thatcher’s landslide victory of 1987, trouncing his socialist Labour Party opponent Jeremy Corbyn by winning 365 parliamentary seats and securing an overall majority of 80. Labour won 203 seats.

The election saw the crumbling of Labour’s “Red Wall” of formerly safe seats in working class areas across northern and central England where most people voted in a 2016 referendum to leave the European Union.

Johnson, the face of the “Leave” campaign in that referendum, fought the election on the slogan “Get Brexit done”.

“I know that people may have been breaking the voting habits of generations to vote for us,” Johnson told supporters in Sedgefield, a symbolically important seat as it was once held by former prime minister Tony Blair, Labour’s most successful leader.

“I want the people of the north east to know that we in the Conservative Party, and I, will repay your trust.”

Brexit was widely seen as the decisive factor in the election, with Johnson’s promise to take Britain out of the EU by Jan. 31, 2020, winning over many former Labour voters.

“What an incredible thing you have done, you have changed the political landscape, you’ve changed the Conservative Party for the better and you’ve changed the future of our country for the better,” said Johnson.

“First of all, what are we going to do to repay that trust? We are going to get Brexit done.”

Johnson, who called the snap election to break years of deadlock in parliament over Brexit, has also promised to spend more money on health, education and the police.

(Reporting by James Davey; Editing by Gareth Jones)

Free America Network Articles

Leave a Reply

Next Post

Brazil Vale dam near site of January disaster has ‘cracks’: TV station

FILE PHOTO: A view of a collapsed tailings dam owned by Brazilian mining company Vale SA, in Brumadinho, Brazil February 13, 2019. REUTERS/Washington Alves/File Photo December 14, 2019 RIO DE JANEIRO (Reuters) – State prosecutors in Brazil have identified cracks in a tailings dam owned by iron ore mining company […]